Books: paperback roundup

Frida: A Biography of Frida Kahlo by Hayden Herrera, Bloomsbury pounds 14.99. In April 1953, shortly before her death at the age of 47, Frida Kahlo staged her first major exhibition of paintings in her native Mexico. No one expected her to attend the opening as she was desperately ill in hospital. But just as the doors opened to the public, an ambulance drew up outside the gallery. The artist dressed in her favourite Mexican peasant dress, jewels and headgear, was carried in a stretcher to the four-poster bed that had been installed in the gallery.

Hayden Herrera has performed the Herculean task of chronicling this extraordinary artist's life with diligence and aplomb. Physical suffering could not dim Kahlo's artistic vision; if anything it inspired her to produce a compelling body of work. Her alegria made her a biographer's gift, as did a life full of bizarre incident, illustrious lovers (namely Trotsky and Isamu Noguchi), with a stormy and obsessive relationship with Mexico's most famous artist, Diego Rivera, at the centre of it. But the dominant factor, as Herrera explains, is the physical agony she endured. In 1925, the 18-year-old Frida was the victim of a horrific accident when a streetcar crashed into the bus she was riding. She was impaled on a steel handrail that exited from her vagina, the collision caused the unfastening of all her clothes, and a packet of powdered gold burst over her bleeding body. Frida simply remarked: "I lost my virginity." Herrera recreates the entire danse macabre of the artist's life, providing insights into her passion for communism, Aztec folklore and dramatic spectacle.

The Diary of Frida Kahlo: An Intimate Self-Portrait: essays and commentaries by Sarah M Lowe, Bloomsbury pounds 20. This facsimile of Frida Kahlo's magnificently illustrated journal intime covers the turbulent years of 1944-54, and each page, with its poems, dreams and sketches, reveals a tireless, imaginative response to the illnesses that plagued her. Carlos Fuentes has written an extensive introduction from the perspective of a fellow countryman, and Sarah Lowe's commentaries help untangle the mix of allegory, surrealism and grotesquerie through which Kahlo evolved a private language of suffering and joy. The illustrations are reproduced in all their dazzling colour, but the frail binding of a paperback (rather like Kahlo's own fractured spine) cannot bear the weight of its load.

The Love Parade by Matthew Branton, Penguin pounds 6.99. Of the many debut novels by startlingly young people published in the past year, critics considered Matthew Branton's as one of the best. It's sassy, contemporary, has plenty of one-liners, and it even ends on a moral. It concerns Jake, the "sulky one" in a disbanded boy band, and a hasbeen at 24. Like everyone else he meets in Los Angeles, Jake wants to turn his life into a screenplay. Then he meets the beautiful and mysterious twins, Brett and River, who come up with a fraudulent scam to help him. Blackmail, baccarat, swinging poolside parties and chic casinos on the French Riviera take up most of the narrative until murder raises the stakes. Only the internet and love can save him. Branton's self- conscious allusions to F Scott Fitzgerald and Nabokov confer some kind of gravitas when his enthusiastic prose style over- extends itself but he succeeds in making a grand entrance into the genre of literary thrillers.

How Many Years by Marguerite Yourcenar; translated by Maria Louise Ascher, Virago pounds 9.99. One of France's most celebrated authors, Marguerite Yourcenar, born Marguerite de Crayencour in 1903, wrote three volumes of autobiography. But given her provenance as the descendant of a grand family of northeastern France, her story and that of her antecedents tells the story of a rapidly changing Europe. Her imaginative recreation of family history focuses on her father, Michel, who fostered in her the intellectual breadth and originality that led to her election as the first female member of the Academie Francaise in 1980. In this second volume she describes Michel's turbulent youth, his desertion from the army, his affairs and three marriages, and his ruinous gambling. But above all, she is mindful of her place in the world: "The angle at whose apex we are lodged gapes behind us toward infinity. Seen in this way, the science of genealogy, which is so often placed in the service of human vanity, leads first to humility." This humility coupled with her wise ruminations renders her trilogy a stunning feat of literary imagination.

Brokeback Mountain by Annie Proulx, Fourth Estate pounds 3.99. Pulitzer prize- winner Annie Proulx takes us to the unforgiving landscape of Wyoming, her home town, in this tiny but perfectly formed novella. It is 30 years ago - when cowboys were cowboys, and horses were glad of it - and Jack and Ennis are ranch hands, "drop-out country boys with no prospects, brought up to hard work and privation". Proulx revels in the rough manners and broken idioms of her protagonists, and escorts us through their long, lonely nights herding sheep on the eponymous, and ultimately deadly, mountain. Her stark prose brilliantly reflects the brutal reality of life for these hard, hopeless men.

Shorts: New Writing from Granta Books, Granta pounds 8.99. Emily Perkins stands out in this collection of short stories in that hers is fresh, funny and insinuating. Other writers, like A L Kennedy and Louis de Bernieres, attempt something rather more ponderous. Kennedy describes the inner torment of a closeted gay office worker - the text in italics signifies his tortured attempts at self-expression - and de Bernieres crafts an elegy to an elderly, lonely animal lover that inevitably dwindles into whimsy. Perkins's story is about rats and the freelance population of London's crumbling tenement buildings (so it strikes a chord with me). But more than that it is an effortless reconstruction of a resonant moment in time in which all the strands of the narrative combine together tellingly. In "Girl", Hanif Kureishi succeeds in condensing the matter of his heroine's life into one revealing episode that hints at so much more, and leaves the reader wondering. These two stories bring the collection alive - but in truth, its eclecticism (bringing together Erica Wagner's lyrical bent and Peter Ho Davies's realism) works against it.

Lilian Pizzichini